Graham Joyce: Dreamside

Brad Cousins. Where the hell are you now?

The trail was erratic. Ella had already exercised her powers by obtaining—against university policy—an original home address and telephone number in Sale, Manchester. It led to an odd phone call.

“Mr, Cousins? My name is Lee Peterson. I’m an old… friend of your son, from university days. I’m trying to get in touch with him.” The line started crackling. “Do you know where I could get hold of him?”

“Nope.”

“No idea?”

“I don’t ask; he don’t tell.” Lee could hear the man’s asthmatic breathing.

“Would Mrs. Cousins know?”

“ She might; but she’ll not tell; she’s been dead six year since.”

The line was beginning to break up.

“Where was he last time you heard?”

“Saudi… Germany… Yugoslavia…” He pronounced this last with a J.

“Can’t you give me an idea?”

At last, and with an air of crushing disinterest, the man yielded the name PhileCo, a Midlands pharmaceutical company his son had worked for some time ago. From PhileCo the unpromising trail led through four drug companies, for which Cousins had been a sales rep in less than as many years. It ran cold with a West Country firm called Lytex, where a chatty personnel officer admitted that, yes, the man had been an employee of the company representing their product to GPs in the region, but that after a few months of mediocre returns he had stopped weighing in for work. Lee emerged from the conversation with an address in Cornwall.

He made careful preparations, packing a double change of clothes, a set of brushes, a travel shaver and a gift manicure set. A manicure set? He wondered when he had become so fastidious.

He took the train to Plymouth, and spent the journey sipping weak tea and gazing gloomily at the landscape. In the carriage window he had three or more ears, multiple eyebrows and chins to spare. He almost liked himself better that way.

His thoughts turned to Ella. Their reunion had plunged him back into the morass of his adolescent longing. He didn’t know whether to blame that on the dreaming or on Ella. He had hoped that his greater maturity would do something to defuse the excitement he felt in her presence, but just thinking about her made his cheeks burn.

She was a witch, he had decided. Or at least a mesmerist or a spellbinder of some kind. It was Ella, after all, who had led him into this whole bizarre situation. All she claimed to want was an end to the dreaming. Yet he knew that Ella was notoriously unclear about her own state of mind. She was not as in control as she liked to appear, and he knew that, behind her assertiveness, she would be depending on his support.

Her behaviour back at his flat had been ambiguous to say the least. She seemed to be signalling that she wanted intimacy, and yet she had kept him at arm’s length. Then she had climbed into his bed half-way through the night, and he had had to pretend to be asleep to avoid making love to her. But at least since she had come his nights had been undisturbed by the repeated dream awakenings.

At Plymouth, Lee hired a Cavalier from a lady in an orange costume and lopsided orange lipstick (which made him think of Ella again). It was already late afternoon.

Dusk was settling. He drove out of town and crossed the Tamar Bridge into Cornwall, heading towards Gunnislake. By the time he reached the village it was dark, and then he got hopelessly lost looking for his turn-off. Eventually he found it—hardly more than a dirt track—and arrived at two isolated cottages. One slouched in semi-derelict condition with a collapsed roof and broken windows; the second was in only slightly better shape. A bare light bulb was burning in a downstairs room.

He drove his car as close as he could to the front door. On a wooden plaque on the wall, weather-split and almost completely effaced, Lee could just about discern the word Elderwine, He sighed, less than happy that he’d found the place.

He switched off the engine and killed the lights. He sat for a moment, hoping that someone would appear. Then he got out of the car and went to the door. No one answered his knock. He tried again, waited, and pushed at the handle. The door swung open; a pile of unopened envelopes lay on the mat. They were addressed to Brad Cousins. Lee went in.

Ella, meanwhile, found her prey with relative ease. The ferryjourney, the disembarkation and the drive down to Fermanagh had gone smoothly, and she was soon walking unchallenged through the doors of the primary school. Through a glass window in a classroom door she saw the woman she sought.

Honora Brennan was gathering up stubbed-out paint brushes and jam jars of murky water, offering words of encouragement after an end-of-day paint your fantasy session—yes anything you like, the sky the trees the stars at night. Is that the stars at night, she says to one seven-year-old with a pink NHS eye patch, no he says it’s the mortar that got me da, is it she says, put it in the pile with the others and wash out your brushes in the sink. On instinct Honora looked up and saw Ella watching her.

Briskly, she dismissed the class, then turned to rinse the paint-pots as if by this chore she could make the other woman disappear. Ella willed her to turn around: Don’t block me out Honora. If Honora heard the words, she fought them.

“Yes, I’m here; you’re not dreaming.”

Honora stiffened, stacking the pots in a precise pyramid.

“How did you get here?” Her back still turned, she scrubbed at an already gleaming jar.

“You can still get a boat across the water.”

“I’m sorry, Ella. I wanted to say ‘It’s lovely to see you’ but I didn’t feel it.”

“Then you were right not to say it.”

Honora busied herself thumb tacking the children’s paintings to the wall. Ella waited.

“Do you know why I came?”

Honora looked into her eyes for the first time. “Can’t we go somewhere?”

Outside, walking side by side in their thick winter coats, Ella was surprised when Honora gently linked arms with her. She remembered that type of endearing, girlish gesture so well; that, and a fresh smell of camomile and rainwater. Honora’s tawny hair fell as it always had, into a tight nest of curls and ringlets. She exuded a vulnerability that made Ella, by contrast, feel coarse.

They went to a small tea shop and peered at each other. The window was misted with condensation. Every time someone came in or left, a door-shaped wedge of cold air sent a shiver around the seated customers. Outside a UDR soldier with his cockade feather erect patrolled by with that circumspect hip-swivelling security walk. Ella watched him.

“After a while you stop seeing them.”

“Are we talking about soldiers?”

“What else? They look like shadows; but they’re real.”

“And what about the real shadows?”

Ella flattered herself that she always knew when someone was dissembling. She had an idea that she could peer, if not into a person’s darkest heart, then at least into the blue or grey or green of their eyes, where she might detect the microscopic splash imperceptible to others. Honora dropped her eyes and tried to change the subject.

“You gave me the fright of my life when I saw you outside the classroom. I never expected to see you again, least of all here. It suddenly brought it all back to me. How we were and all that. Weren’t we crazy then, Ella? Wasn’t it all madness?”

“Oh yes, it was that all right.”